Macro-Typography

The layout of text on a page follows certain rules that
generally remain unconscious after they have been learned. Only when
young children or newcomers to literacy write on paper do we realize from
the "oddness" or "disorder" of the arrangement that these rules have been
breached. The introduction of personal computers in the 1990s made many
adults feel like children again as they struggled to arrange text on
computer screens.

This research website and style guide investigates these
rules and examines the ways in which traditional mise-en-page has
been adapted to the web. It will examine the invisible architecture
of information, the history of text arrangement (which generally goes
back to Antiquity) and the mechanisms offered by web-browser software to
replicate and augment traditional formats such as the footnote, verse,
the list and the stemma.

To understand the browser discussion, readers will need
to know at least a little about two mark-up languages: HTML and Cascading
Style Sheets (CSS). The historical discussion includes links to digitized
manuscripts which follow the rules that later became codified as
macro-typography.